Tim Higgins had some problems with kids cutting through his yard. His solution is a water cannon sentry that watches the yard and hoses down trespassers. I’m dreaming of making something like this to keep the squirrels off of my tomatoes, so it’s cool to see what worked and what didn’t in Tim’s system.

I decided to go back to a thick client, dump the web camera and moved to an Infrared camera. The most important upgrade was to an open source library that I found called Aforge. Andrew Kirillov has done a fantastic job with his library . It held the foundation of version 2’s code base. It provided me with the motion detection I needed plus had an avi writer sample. He also had some great topics on “codeproject.com” on uses of his library.

I haven’t monkeyed with it, but AForge looks promising. It’s an open source C# framework containing libraries for not only computer vision, but also machine learning and artificial intelligence. If you do your hacking in .Net, AForge might be a good place to start for those computer vision projects you’ve been putting off.